Saturday, November 3, 2012

I've been giving a lot of interviews lately, so it was interesting to receive an email reminding me of an interview I did over a year ago with Julia Shew and Anagha Vaidhyanathan. Here's the first paragraph--I generally can't recall clearly what I've said in interviews, and I hope I'm answering current ones as well.

Anagha: What inspired you to leave the academic nest and
begin manipulating markets in the real world?

Roth: I haven’t left the classroom! We’re trying to
create market design as an academic field in Economics and make it a way for Economists
to earn their living. Market design is useful for a couple of reasons. First,
to see if we know what we’re talking about. Second, to learn more – of course
we don’t know what we’re talking about until we go out and see why things don’t
work the way we think they should work. And third, to do some good in the world.
Once we think we know something about how things might work better, we try to
help out.